Posted
by
Zonkon Tuesday March 14, 2006 @11:15AM
from the quite-the-little-scamps dept.

Robert wrote to mention a Computer Business Review Online article about SCO's newest marketing tactic. They're offering their OS as part of a 'SCAMP' stack, ala the more familiar LAMP setup. From the article: "The Lindon, Utah-based Unix vendor has included the open source Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP and Perl programming languages with its SCO OpenServer operating system since the launch of OpenServer 6 in June 2005. It is now pitching the technologies as a SCAMP stack, placing it squarely up against the Linux-based LAMP stack. SCO claims that Linux contains Unix code donated to the open source operating system in violation of agreements between it and IBM Corp."

Presumably due to heavy Irish immigration during the Potato famine, that word is definitely in the US vocabulary, too. I have no idea what crack they were smoking for that name, because there's just no way nobody involved knew what it meant.

I honestly said out loud when I saw this story on the frontpage, "Is this a joke?"

Incidentally, a lot of words survive in English primarily as part of a phrase, with their older, original meanings lost. In a way, the phrase is the word. For example, "hither and yon"; neither word is in common or even uncommon use anymore on its own, but the phrase is still used uncommonly. While "scamp" has not descended to this level, there is a phrase associated with it in my mind that may outlast the word itself: 'a scamp and a scoundrel [google.com]' (and note we don't much use "scoundrel" anymore either), as in "he's a scamp and a scoundrel".

So again, what crack were these people smoking? I mean, I know we like to bag on marketters around here, but there is a certain level of skill involved...

Stupidity can happen anywhere, if not more so in the U.S.A. The transit authority in Silicon Valley came up with with this cute acronym: SCAT. Until someone pointed out that one of definitions of the word "scat" is "excrement, especially of an animal; dung." Considering that the city of San Jose spent several million USD on a public art piece that looks like a pile of dog poop, the transit authority didn't want to step into that mess and picked a different acronym.

It is now pitching the technologies as a SCAMP stack, placing it squarely up against the Linux-based LAMP stack. SCO claims that Linux contains Unix code donated to the open source operating system in violation of agreements between it and IBM Corp.

Big whoop. SCAMP, LAMP... so SCO is trying to compete with Linux. This is hardly news. As a matter of fact, you have to wonder what took them so long. Have they become so lawsuit happy that they've forgotten how to compete?

Have they become so lawsuit happy that they've forgotten how to compete?

Yes, actually. As soon as Caldera took over the SCO Unix business, they pretty much dropped any real support for the platform and focused their efforts on sueing Linux. If the reports are to be believed, their distributors were about ready to hang them during the various regional meetings. The SCO corporate reps came across as somewhat anxious about all the bad will towards them, but definitely not apologetic.

The fallout of these meetings was expected to be that SCO would lose a lot of their local distributors. The results of which would be catastrophic if SCO were actually trying to do business. Now that they realize that their lawsuit has failed, they've found that they've screwed themselves on being able to do business. In addition, they've burned their OSS bridge (guess we won't be seeing an opensco.org, eh?), leaving them with no real edge in the market. So now they're trying to convince businesses that they can provide OSS support without being an OSS supporter.

My prediction? You're going to be seeing quite a few new Solaris 10/OpenSolaris installations very soon now.

I even remember back when they were Caldera. We'd see them at tradeshows all the time and wonder how on earth they planned to make it as a RedHat clone. I never thought they'd go this route. It's pretty sad really.This is all pretty indicative of the times. A company need not actually make a product people need to use. They just have to either scare people away from competitors, or convince them that a bigger name is actually more important. Of course, bigger name for SCO just means that more people h

The thing I remember about Caldera, was the installer. While it was copying the files to disk (a process which at that time could take 20 minutes or longer - hell actually with today's DVD distros it can still take that long), it let you play a tetris clone.

To this day I miss this feature. I mean, you can only watch the marketing "This OS Rules!" crap all over the screen for so many installs before you want to drill your eyes out.

Excellent, so we just install from a 1GB flash drive or NFS mount and everything's cool right?

Distribution of console-sized video games or full-sized operating system environments to residential end users on flash memory or network-attached hard disk drives is still uneconomic in 2006 except in the special case of a hard disk drive that comes bundled with a new computer.

Technician Ted (Hewson) had a counter that went around on the screen while the game loaded. I think this was the first. The first game to play a game while loading a game was Joe Blade 2 (Players), which had a simple pac-man type game.

Joe Blade 2 may be prior art for some of the claims of US Patent 5,718,632 assigned to Namco [uspto.gov], as may some other games mentioned in this thread on IGDA Forums [igda.org], but claim 12 refers explicitly to an optical disk. At the time, Spectrum games were distributed on cassette, not Compact Disc Digital Audio. So even if none of the rest of the claims hold up under reexamination, if Namco was the first to do it with a CD, claim 12 may remain valid against Linux distributors.

Paticular since it was done by people from another company working in a different country. Wasn't it someone at TrollTech in Norway who wrote the tetris game in the caldera installer? How can you patent something you buy from a contractor? This bunch had IP law abuse problems even before they deliberately drove the company into the IBM wall and employed the brother of the boss to expensively try to straighten out the legal dents.

The Ubuntu live CD has numerous games installed on its desktop that you can play while the installer is running. I've tried the installer (espresso), and it works, although it is not finished yet, and YMMV.

It isn't safe to use SCAMP. SCO's corporate future is uncertain. They've based their entire company around a lawsuit that it looks like they will probably lose. It would be a bad idea to use SCAMP for a production system only to have SCO go bankrupt a year or two later.

Sure, you could convert your SCAMP-based application to LAMP if that happens, but doing that on a production system is very costly due to all the manpower to switch platforms and all the testing to make sure everything works.

You should ask yourself, what advantages does SCAMP offer over LAMP that warrants the risk of using a platform from a dying company? Are there even any such advantages at all?

It would be a bad idea to use SCAMP for a production system only to have SCO go bankrupt a year or two later.

I wouldn't say that.

SCAMP is short on details, but it sounds like it's exactly the same tools as in LAMP... but in SCO. Except that you could just drop your application back into Linux, and it would just work there too. You could also move it to FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD... probably even Windows (most of the LAMP stuff runs under cygwin at least, and there's probably native Windows versions of most of it) and it would even work there with minimal work.

I don't see much danger here. (Of course, I don't see much benefit in going with SCO in the first place, and so I certainly wouldn't do so.)

As far as I can tell, it's just a marketing ploy. `Look! We can do the same thing as Linux, but we have a cuter name for it! So use us!'. There's little danger, as your application would probably port right back to a LAMP system with little effort, but there's no benefit either, because a LAMP system would work just as well from the beginning.

XAMPP and other similar projects make it really easy to install all that stuff under windows. It's easier in some respects to install XAMPP under windows than it is for Linux, particulary for someone with out any Linux experience.

You're missing my point. You still need to replace all your servers, port your content (which could be as simple as copying it over), and test it.Replacing production servers either means downtime for a production system, or new hardware to be purchased. Setting up the new servers is time consuming. Testing HAS to be done any time you change config, let alone re-installing the OS.

So the potential danger is there, I think. Either you're going to spend a lot of money on the changeover buying new hardware to r

You're missing my point. You still need to replace all your servers, port your content (which could be as simple as copying it over), and test it.

Replacing production servers either means downtime for a production system, or new hardware to be purchased. Setting up the new servers is time consuming. Testing HAS to be done any time you change config, let alone re-installing the OS.

SCAMP is short on details, but it sounds like it's exactly the same tools as in LAMP... but in SCO. Except that you could just drop your application back into Linux, and it would just work there too. You could also move it to FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD... probably even Windows (most of the LAMP stuff runs under cygwin at least, and there's probably native Windows versions of most of it) and it would even work there with minimal work.

So the best thing they offer over the competition is the ease with which

So the best thing they offer over the competition is the ease with which you can switch to the competition when they go out of business?

No, because the competition offers that too!

Really, they offer one thing -- a cooler acronym, SCAMP vs. LAMP. And while I'm not sure about this, it would also appear that they offer support for this, things that generally aren't supported, but it wouldn't surprise me if Redhat and other vendors also offer similar support. If so, then the big benefit is the better

It isn't safe to use SCAMP. SCO's corporate future is uncertain. They've based their entire company around a lawsuit that it looks like they will probably lose. It would be a bad idea to use SCAMP for a production system only to have SCO go bankrupt a year or two later.

It's not safe to not use [cio-today.com] SCO, at least if you used to be a customer at some point. It's sad, but I think that they actually have customers that are hoping they'll go bust, in order to cease being their customer without risking getting sue

Once IBM gets done eviscerating SCO in court, they'll probably end up owning all SCO's IP and assets. Which means at that point you'll be working with an IBM shop. No doubt IBM will provide a migration path to AIX or Linux, so if you go the SCO route now you'll be back on a LAMP or AAMP platform in a couple of years anyway. The only reason to go with them now is that you feel more comfortable on SCO's UNIX platform. That thing has always felt awkward and clunky to me, from the first time I used it in '89 un

Once IBM gets done eviscerating SCO in court, they'll probably end up owning all SCO's IP and assets

Forgetting the $34,000,000 plus interest that the SCO Group owes Novell [groklaw.net] from the M$ and Sun license fees? Or the fact that Novell still own the UNIX copyrights, that tSCOg has no trade secrets or patents? Or the Red Hat suit?

A happy thought is these 3 passing round the hot, smoking corpse of Cald^H^H^H^H^H tSCOg: "Here, take it", "No, it's yours", "We insist" while trying to ignore the stench of napalm-bu

IBM can't obtain IP that SCO doesn't own. SCO doesn't even own the Unix copyrights that they're claiming, Novell does.So, there is a small chance that IBM would feel bad for SCO customers and offer to support them, but that is unlikely.

Besides, SCO is sueing IBM, not the other way around. I don't think IBM can claim damages when they're the defendant. I think the best they can do (and what they want to do) is have the lawsuit dismissed.

Another danger is that SCO will go bankrupt before the court case even e

FUD... It's not just for SCO anymore.
Seriously, while your post may be genuinely well-intentioned, it is a rather blatant load of FUD. It is entirely possible that SCO will continue to exist after they lose this lawsuit.

Is it possible? Yes. Is it worth the risk? No. This isn't FUD.Want proof? SCO just announced a few days ago that their net loss for the last quarter of $4.58 million dollars. That is up from the year ago quarter's net loss of $2.96 million. Their profits are also down, going from the year ago quarter's $8.86 million to the current quarter's $7.34 million.

This is a company that, even if they don't get destroyed by IBM, will probably collapse under their own debt. They can't keep losing millions of dollars ev

There will be NOTHING left of SCOs, There is no basis to there lawsuit. IBM spends more on Coffee in a quarter than SCOX is worth. IBM could have bought SCOX out and ended this 2 years ago. THEY DIDN'T This means that they intend to Burn SCOX down, stomp the ashes, Salt the earth, burn the Salty ashy earth, and flush it into a refuse dump.

It isn't safe to use LAMP. GNU's fiscal future is certain. They've based their entire organization around giving software away for free. It would be a bad idea to use LAMP for a production system only to have the developers get 'real jobs'.

Sure, you could convert your LAMP-based application to SCAMP if that happens, but doing that on a production system is very costly due to all the manpower to document the old system and all the conversions from unsupported formats.

You should ask yourself, what advantages does LAMP offer over SCAMP that warrants the risk of using a platform from a bunch of communist hippies? Are there even any such advantages at all?

It will save a lot of viewing time for those readers who actually want to find out about how SCAMP measures up to LAMP, LAPP, WAMP etc.

Why should anyone care? SCO are attempting to copy something which exists already while charging more for it. The reason they went the 'sue IBM and Linux' way in the first place was that they could not compete. A couple of years down the track, their lawsuit is on the rocks, they have seriously annoyed everyone (except Microsoft), they have neglected their main product wh

LAMP isn't so much a literal acronym as much as is stands for the concept of all the components being open source. I doubt many people would stop calling it LAMP if it included FreeBSD instead of Linux, nor would replacing MySQL with ProgreSQL suddenly turn it into something completely different. Hell, the P can mean PHP, Perl or Python, and I think even Ruby would count as a LAMP language.

So how this SCAMP thing is supposed to be anything special, is completely beyond my comprehention.

However, I for one would be VERY curious as to how SCO is treating all the different FOSS licenses which apply. As far as I know, Apache's license has a mutual patent annihilation clause, and I'm pretty sure the other licenses have their own set of rules too. It would be all too funny if one of them found a reason to sue SCO over their prepackaged SCAMP solution.

Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by 21 Secunia advisories [secunia.com] some of which are rated Highly critical.

While OpenServer 6 was launched in two versions, with the Starter Edition for two users costing $599, and the Enterprise Edition for 10 users costing $1,399, the SCAMP stack is licensed for five users and is available for $999 until July 31.

Now wait, I'd be curious about this. It sounds to me like "SCAMP" is basically four free programs packaged together. Every single one of those four programs is under a different open source license, and the strictest of those licenses-- the GPL [theregister.co.uk]-- SCO is probably not bou

Especially considering that some browsers will open two connections to load a page, and most will keep the connection open for a second or so just in case it needs to make more requests. If there are dialup users where each page load takes five seconds, and opens two connections, and users click about once every twenty seconds...you need ten people to render the website unusable, on average. (It can handle less dialup people than normal peo

SCO only allows a specific number of login shells to be active at once... it's really obnoxious.

I worked at a place that used SCO OpenServer about 5 years ago... the costs were outrageous. At that time you had to buy additional users in multiples of 25, which cost about $5000 + 20% annual maintenance.

I can't comment on what the point is in 2006. Back around 1996-9 when Caldera was doing this the idea was that there were commercial applications which hasn't been ported to Linux. Thus there was a chicken and egg problem for OEMs with LAMP; they depended on other apps or libraries and the libraries needed apps to make it worth the trouble to port.... The Linux abi project pretty much solved this problem. Further the commercial apps on SCO don't really exist anymore.Anyway, a little irony. Caldera in

Does the lawsuit come for free, or is it extra? SCO sues their customers, so why again would I touch them, 10 foot pole or not?

Then again, lets see about the technical merits. Other than the underlying OS, it is the same as the LAMP package. That means the choice is Linux vs SCO. From what I gather, SCO is:1) Less secure2) More expensive3) Prone to legal attacks toward users4) Far less supported5) Far less available software/plugins6) Has serious questions about the company being there in a year7) Laughably scalable8) Drivers?

I could go on, but you get the point. The vultures are circling, and no amount of hand-waving is going to fix things.

didn't sco executives claim that linux was being used by terrorists? i seem to recall they claimed this in testimony in washington or in a letter to lawmakers.

the claim was too obvious... i'm certain that linux, windows, macs, and all other kinds of OSes and computers are being used by terrorists. (except for Windows Millenium Edition, which Al Qaida's IT department would not support because it sucked so bad).

but sco's suggestion was not the fact that terrorists use all kinds of tools, but rather they